Younger the better, Jesse, though I LOVE the high school look on Barry.

House: I can see Cuddy wanting House to donate. She could guarantee good brains. Didn't she ask Wilson out once, making Wilson and House think she was scouting donors?

I agree that the setup between Cuddy and House is a bit abrupt, but at least the groundwork is there. They've innuendod at each other for years, and Cuddy does seem to be the only person House will actually concede a position to. I so want to see Cameron's reaction if Cuddy got pregnant by House. She'd be so damned jealous. Poor Chase, he's got the true hots for Cameron, and Cameron just needs smacked. Foreman's insights are good, Cameron is hard enough to deal with without her being lovelorn and broken hearted.

And tonight is Bones and the return of Brennan's killer dad. And Bondage!Booth! It's a different sort of appeal than House.

Flea, I think there is a baby pic of him with his dad on the cover of his book. If you amazon it, I think you'll see it. Unless i'm misremembering.

I love that high school picture. HS! In Hawaii!

I *think* the pictures on his book are his mom and dad as kids, with their parents. Our copy is checked out, and Amazon doesn't say specifically, but it looks to me like a white man with a little girl and a black mother and child (gender uncertain at the resolution I have). And they don't have "search inside" for this title!

I have to go rewatch House. My son called in the middle and I missed a lot of good stuff.

ION, it's snowing here. In April. Not unheard of, but I really wish it wouldn't.

Later, customers attested that they heard the coyote say, "Find your soul mate, Homer...."

Hearts Teppy.

Kat, I'm sorry your mom is being a teen on you. Bah.

I love that high school picture. HS! In Hawaii!

It's really darling. And, err. Wow. He's younger than my sister by almost a year.

Speaking of Sleestaks....

In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains

Just as the mouse brain is a lizard brain "with some extra stuff thrown on top," Linden writes, the human brain is essentially a mouse brain with extra toppings. That's how we wound up with two vision systems. In amphibians, signals from the eye are processed in a region called the midbrain, which, for instance, guides a frog's tongue to insects in midair and enables us to duck as an errant fastball bears down on us. Our kludgy brain retains this primitive visual structure even though most signals from the eye are processed in the visual cortex, a newer addition. If the latter is damaged, patients typically say they cannot see a thing. Yet if asked to reach for an object, many of them can grab it on the first try. And if asked to judge the emotional expression on a face, they get it right more often than chance would predict—especially if that expression is anger.

They're not lying about being unable to see. In such "blindsight," people who have lost what most of us think of as vision are seeing with the amphibian visual system. But because the midbrain is not connected to higher cognitive regions, they have no conscious awareness of an object's location or a face's expression. Consciously, the world looks inky black. But unconsciously, signals from the midbrain are merrily zipping along to the amygdala (which assesses emotion) and the motor cortex (which makes the arm reach out).

...

With modern parts atop old ones, the brain is like an iPod built around an eight-track cassette player. One reptilian legacy is that as our eyes sweep across the field of view, they make tiny jumps. At the points between where the eyes alight, what reaches the brain is blurry, so the visual cortex sees the neural equivalent of jump cuts. The brain nevertheless creates a coherent perception out of them, filling in the gaps of the jerky feed. What you see is continuous, smooth. But as often happens with kludges, the old components make their presence felt in newer systems, in this case taking a system that worked well in vision and enlisting it higher-order cognition. Determined to construct a seamless story from jumpy input, for instance, patients with amnesia will, when asked what they did yesterday, construct a story out of memory scraps.

I've mentioned this before, but I find stuff like this fascinating....

the human brain is essentially a mouse brain with extra toppings.

Mine must have whipped cream and chopped nuts today.

Brains are neato! No wonder zombies like 'em so much.